


The First Cut Is the Deepest

by Cambusmore



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-11
Updated: 2014-04-11
Packaged: 2018-01-19 00:50:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1449196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cambusmore/pseuds/Cambusmore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Altaïr is gravely injured, Kadar eases his recovery most effectively.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First Cut Is the Deepest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aoigensou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aoigensou/gifts).



> Heavy on fluff, light on plot.
> 
> Thanks to LT for unconditional beta love.

Nothing has ever gone wrong before, although he is a murderer not a shepherd. There is no hesitation in the thrust of the dagger, that first, deep cut like a Templar signature, and Altaïr knows from the bright burn as the blade sinks into the flesh between his ribs that it has been steeped in poison. _But which one?_ That seems important, but he is already hopelessly confused, wrenching his limp assailant off his sword with a shove of his boot and staggering into a run, up a crumbling hareem wall and onto the sun-baked roofs of Jerusalem. 

Even thinking is slowing him down, his dulling mind no longer quite managing two things at once, but Altaïr cannot help but wonder how he became so fatally distracted. Was he blinded by the sun slicing into his eyes from above the teeming marketplace? Or was it perhaps the permanent desperation etched on the orphaned beggar boy’s face, reminding him with a quick pang of his own motherless childhood? Somehow, he had missed the intent gleam of violence in the lamp seller’s eyes as he jostled closer, mistook the stench of fear clinging damply to the man’s skin for that of industry.

Altaïr nearly misses the next rooftop, scrabbling at the edge so desperately that he leaves half his fingernails embedded in the flaking clay. Hoisting himself up on his shaking arms, he thinks, _It isn’t much further. It can’t be._ It can’t be because he’s going to die soon, expire on his back on this scorching roof, looking up at circling hawks and minarets. He breathes once, twice, gets to his feet, stands, and it all takes so much longer than he can afford. Which _way_ is the bureau, though? Everything around him is competing for his attention, muting his well-honed instincts. The clanging church bells blare in his ears even as his hearing begins to fail. And the sodden red on the front of his white robe keeps fluttering into sight, so that he wonders how it got there, over and over again. A few more jumps. Now it’s only momentum keeping him lumbering forward, hopefully in the right direction, not that he can tell as his vision dims so that there is only light and growing dark, spreading like ink. 

Altaïr drops like a cat from the rooftop lattice, wobbling on his ankles as he lands, and remembers to rinse what is left of the dead man off his hands at the fountain before staggering into the Jerusalem Bureau and the arms of the first faintly familiar boy he sees.

***

Days and nights pass like dreams, strange and dissonant. Time becomes a procession of images and sensations, snatched from his memory or from the very room in which he fights for his life, he can’t tell. Sometimes it hurts, but mostly it doesn’t. Pain is familiar at least, like the bells of Golgotha, the muezzin’s call, the smell of cedar in the air, green eyes all the brighter for the skin the colour of burnt sugar around them. Other things, incongruous fragments like nonsense, creep into his brain. The feel of the mountain snow in Syria in his tiny hands, the din of bees, jackals crushing mint underfoot, a city built of rivers – all clamour for just as much attention as the here and now, that is until one morning when he wakes up to those frowning eyes full of light, like the best Constantinople glass, and knows his name is Altaïr and that he is an Assassin.

Who is this watchful novice who insists on weaning him off the poppy from the moment his eyes are open and asks him if losing his finger hurt? He is familiar, but misplaced and it is a buzzing aggravation to Altaïr like his itching wound because the recognition just might mean that he is a former Templar opponent dressed in the Brotherhood’s whites. _Who is this boy?_ He finds that he would dearly like to know his name.

The next day, over a meal of crumbling goat’s cheese, exquisitely salty, and mint tea, he has it. “You are Malik’s brother.”

The boy looks at him sharply, turning back to his fastidious folding a moment later. “I am. With a name of my own of all things.”

“Oh?” Altaïr can’t quite keep the amusement from his voice. “And what would that be?”

Still folding and sullen as anything, “Kadar.”

He smiles into his tea.

***

The small table between Altaïr and Rafiq is heaped with food, typical of Kadar’s immoderate hospitality. Much intrigue has arisen in the weeks of his convalescence. As daylight assassinations run somewhat counter to their public ideals, the Templars are privately trying to pin the botched job of Altaïr’s murder on someone else. Rafiq laughingly relays an array of suspects between bites of fig: the lamp seller gone mad and acting alone, Altaïr’s deranged boy lover, a shortchanged prostitute, a eunuch driven to violence after Altaïr’s frenzied night in the hareem he is meant to guard. Almost all of the rumours circulating reflect well on Altair - in one respect at least - a favour the Templars cannot have intended to bestow. Now that the wound is scarring over under Kadar’s diligent care, it is almost amusing.

“You must decide if you will seek revenge, Altaïr,” says Rafiq inevitably, “or if you will allow any member of the Brotherhood to exact it in your absence.”

“You know that I would do it myself,” he says. 

Kadar sets pistachios in honey between them, the plate clanging against the copper tabletop a little more loudly than it needs to.

“Of course, Altaïr, of course. But you are not speaking in absolutes as you normally do. Are you thinking of letting this craven act go unpunished?”

“No, not at all,” he hesitates here as he becomes aware of both Rafiq and Kadar’s watchful silence, “It’s just that, I don’t know what they held over that lamp seller to compel him to such folly. He is dead, I am assuming…?” Kadar nods from across to the room, arms folded and hip cocked against a pillar. “And I will not act against his family in his stead.”

“It must be a Templar life taken then,” prompts Rafiq.

“Yes,” but Altaïr sounds uncertain, even to himself. 

Kadar is back, dropping a tray of figs on the table with a clang and a distinct huff.

“What is it, novice?” hisses Rafiq, annoyed. Altaïr is alarmingly inclined to feel more indulgent. Just a fortnight ago he would have pulled rank if Kadar had so much as sighed in earshot.

“Any old Templar will do? Not the one who actually ordered the murder, or threatened the lamp seller or…or…” Kadar runs out of courage then, flushing red across his dusky cheeks.

“All Templars are guilty by virtue of what they are,” Rafiq says precisely, like a recitation of something he had to learn by heart to believe.

Ignoring him completely, Kadar steps in front of where Altaïr sits so that he has to look at him, pinned by the liquid green appeal of his eyes. “What if it was me?” he implores. “What if someone killed me for all the ill you have done? Would that be fair? Would that be…right?”

“Of course not,” he answers quietly and with a little more in his voice than he wants Rafiq to hear. Altaïr searches the table and snatches up his tea for something to do with his hands, something else to look at but this pleading boy. “Thank you, Kadar. Rafiq and I would speak of private matters now.” If Kadar makes a face as he leaves, Altaïr does not see it, sipping his tea with feigned indifference. But he can see Rafiq’s, carefully blank when he manages to look up.

“You’re taking your time healing, Altaïr.”

“The blade was poisoned.”

“I see.” Rafiq pops some lokum in his mouth and chews it slowly to take up the speculative silence between them. Swallowing he continues, “Malik’s been complaining about you.”

“Malik does that.”

“He says that if you weren’t so reckless, you wouldn’t have half of Jerusalem trying to kill you.”

“Malik would think that.”

“And that you would not be endangering his brother.”

Altaïr sits up from the jumble of cushions abruptly enough that his wound protests. 

“How am I doing that exactly?”

“By charming him into thinking that you are an example to follow.”

“I have done no such thing,” he scoffs.

“Certainly not,” replies Rafiq, although it doesn’t sound like agreement. “You aren’t at all charming, for one.”

“Rafiq, I was unconscious for most of the time I have been here!”

“Indeed. But you know what Malik is like. He’s worse when it comes to his brother. He didn’t want him to join the Assassins in the first place. Too soft.”

“He is…thoughtful, not soft. It isn’t the same thing.”

“I’m just telling you what Malik said.”

“I really don’t care what Malik said.”

“Alright, alright, Altaïr,” placates Rafiq as he stands. “I’m off to Masyaf to get my next mission. Any messages?”

“Tell everyone to stop gossiping,” he mutters.

“Don’t give them a reason to,” replies Rafiq, as he slips out the window and drops out of sight.

Much later, when Kadar has ceased sulking long enough to bring him a dinner of hardboiled eggs and bitter olives, Altaïr tells him, “I need to move about. I need to start leaving this room and going outside,” and after a moment, when Kadar’s expression doesn’t change, “I could show you a few things you haven’t learned yet.” And that earns him a pleased smile and a thrill in his guts he pretends isn’t there.

***

Kadar’s sullen, scolding turns vanish with the relentless sunlight of their outdoor lessons. He is already dangerously adept with a sword and a dagger, possessing the innate patience that tells him when blocking and waiting are better than furious jabs. He should live to retire from active service, a rare accomplishment. After a few days of watching the sweat roll from the boy’s hairline down his neck, into the hollow there at his throat and under his tunic until he pulls it up to wipe his face, Altaïr begins to question his motives for insisting on these drills. And his cut throbs with the activity. Time to teach Kadar what is overlooked in training, but learned by necessity when one’s profession is murder: on to stealth.

“It’ll never work!” moans Kadar, following Altaïr’s nod towards a group of white-robed scholars ambling towards the gates of Jerusalem. Ensconced in the upper reaches of a cedar some distance away, Altaïr doesn’t remember when he’s spent a more pleasant hour, breathing in the perfume of the tree that is also Kadar’s scent and chuckling at his patent disbelief about almost everything.

“Go on, get down,” he says reluctantly and drops to the ground, jostling his wound slightly. They hurry to catch up to the small group just as they turn a bend and come into sight of the gate guards. The scholars part and array themselves around Kadar and Altaïr without hesitation, swallowing them with their uniformity.

“They’ll see us!” hisses Kadar.

“They won’t, shush,” says Altaïr, but he is laughing.

“Just because we bow our heads and dress in white and walk among them, you expect Templars to take us for scholars?”

Altaïr grins, fierce and rare, “Works every time.”

Of course it does. Just as they cross the threshold of the gate undetected, Kadar reaches out and squeezes Altaïr’s hand with elation and he lets him.

***

Soon enough, he knows he is healed, but finds other areas in which Kadar’s training is lacking.

“But I want to learn to drop on targets from above.”

“No, not yet. We have to eavesdrop.”

“That’s boring.”

“Yes, it is, but it is also difficult. And you will be asked to do it at least a hundred times, so it’s worth being good at.” He stops grumbling then and gets on with it, always pushing back a little until Altaïr explains the use of such skills. It is a predictable pattern, but not unpleasant. 

Sitting on a worn bench by a well, tucked away from the cardo and commerce, they spend an afternoon disguised in scribe’s smocks, one ear to the news being discussed and one to their own idle chat. Altaïr tells him about the snow in the mountains he now dreams of nightly, of his private reservations about the direction of the Brotherhood, about how to recognize a Templar assassination when it is happening. 

“Innocents will hesitate, even those who intend to kill you, but are moved to it out of desperation. They will need to work up to stabbing properly. Templars will not. When they attack, the first cut is the deepest.”

Kadar is quiet for so long, Altaïr isn’t sure he’s heard. 

Eventually, he asks, “Will you? Will you kill a random Templar to avenge the attack on you?”

Altaïr looks away and shakes his head, “I don’t know.”

As the sunlight begins to wane and gilds every strand of hair on Kadar – his eyelashes and eyebrows, the errant curl against his forehead, his day-old beard – Altaïr wants to wash the day off.

“Let’s go to the baths.”

***

It grows more difficult for Altaïr to feign indifference. At night, he used to conjure visions of women of a transparent pallor, stroking himself to the thought of their moonlit bodies in rhythmic motion under him. Now the skin is darker, like amber honey, and the body, always the same one, sturdier and muscled, with a dark arrow of hair leading down between its legs. And when it writhes, it is not always under him. That’s why he suggested the baths, to see what he would look like pink and clean, with water beading on his chest, and to have his scar fussed over, to be touched. Altaïr can’t even find it in himself to feel shame. 

***

He intends to leave for Masyaf the next morning. Long recovered, he has dallied here for no good reason, although skin that colour and a sweet disposition seemed reason enough. To his credit, Kadar does not sulk when Altaïr announces that he must go, and this grown man, this intractable and blooded assassin, is a little disappointed at that. They drink sweet burning mead confiscated from English hostages into the late evening until the sun drops below the city, extinguishing the ornate rose pattern the light from the window casts at their feet.

Kadar begins to babble excitedly about his final initiation into the Brotherhood, the removal of his third finger to ease the use of the hidden blade wielded by the Assassins. With his thumb, Altaïr rubs at the spot where his own finger had been cut years ago, relishing the striking sensitivity its removal left behind.

“It’s a stupid ritual.”

“What? Why?” Kadar is aghast and Altaïr finds that he wants to smile, again.

“Because it makes it easy to identify us. We are meant to be quiet, stealthy. That is what distinguishes us from Templar brutishness. There must be a way to adapt the hidden blade to an intact hand.”

The Assassins are too easy to spot for their missing fingers. Altaïr has long felt this way, but never strongly enough to broach the subject with Al Mualim. And it is the thought of this boy losing a finger, of anyone hurting him, of his feeling _any_ pain, that turns him against the practice entirely. It is time for a change and it will start with Kadar.

“Malik says you might as well be a Templar for all your arrogance.”

“Malik often says things like that about me.”

“Sometime I worry that he is right.”

“Then I will gladly break a Templar rule here and now to reassure you.”

“They have no rules,” says Kadar a little uncertainly.

“They have one. Stand up.” He does.

Altaïr rises and takes four measured steps towards the boy, backing him into the corner of the twilit bedchamber.

“What is the rule?” whispers Kadar and although his voice trembles, he never looks away from Altaïr.

“No brother shall presume to kiss neither widow, nor virgin, nor mother, nor sister, nor aunt, nor any other woman.”

“I am not a woman,” breathes Kadar, urging his mouth closer to Altaïr’s.

“No, you're not,” he says and kisses Kadar, thinking he might as well stay a few more days anyway.


End file.
